Comments on: Mary Douglas

By: Mary Douglas in Memoriam « Anthropology.net

Mary Douglas in Memoriam « Anthropology.net — Sat, 26 May 2007 06:49:19 +0000

[...] Mary Douglas in Memoriam Jump to Comments I first got word of Mary Douglas’ death from Rex’s post over at Savage Minds. It seems like a lot of good anthropologists have passed away this year, such as F. Clark Howell. Douglas was a cultural anthropologist, and from Wikipedia, she was, “well known for her writings on human culture and symbolism. She was also considered a follower of Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.” [...]

By: Four Stone Hearth at Greg Laden

Four Stone Hearth at Greg Laden — Thu, 24 May 2007 01:40:17 +0000

[...] As you surely know, Anthropologist Mary Douglas passed away recently. Several blogs assemble commemorative material on this very significant anthropologist. Please visit these sites, pay your respects, and if you are not familiar with Mary’s work, investigate! Savage Minds, antropologi.info ____________________________ [...]

By: Rena Lederman

Rena Lederman — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:47:21 +0000

Just an anecdotal addendum to Alex’s note and these links:
I got to know Mary Douglas a bit, years ago, over the several alternate semesters when she was a visiting professor (split between anthropology, sociology, and religion) at Princeton. I still tell students about the time she came to my four-walls-of-books office and, scanning for a half second, made an immediate beeline to the spot where her own books were shelved. There she pulled down, of all things, Rules and Meanings (a reader she edited — Penguin 1973 — of cross-disciplinary selections on the meanings of the everyday), declaring it of all her books her “favorite”! (I was speechless.)

With selections from Wittgenstein, Garfinkle, Evans-Pritchard, Cage and others, it’s still “good to teach”. Douglas’s own epigraphic section introductions are real gems. For example, the epigraph to the very first section on “Tacit Conventions” goes like this:

“How the moral order is known — how the inner experience of morality is related to the moral order without — this depends on hidden processes. Each person confronted with a system of ends and means (not necessarily a tidy and coherent system) seems to face the order of nature, objective and independent of human wishes. But the moral order and the knowledge which sustains it are created by social conventions. If their man-made origins were not hidden, they would be stripped of some of their authority. Therefore the conventions are not merely tacit, but extremely inaccessible to investigation. This book of readings is addressed to the question of how reality is constructed, how it is given its moral bias and how the process of construction is veiled. The dates of the selections are part of the theme and deserve particular attention. Over and over the same questions are taken up as if from scratch. The dates themselves show over fifty years how repugnant and easy to forget is Plato’s concept of the good lie, and how difficult to contemplate steadily our responsibility for creating our own environment.”

I know that Douglas is often derided for her “grid/group” formulae and a certain political conservatism. However, it has always seemed to me that her actual work has a depth and radicalism that makes it quite applicable to critical projects. This epigraph — which I read as a provocation concerning “structure” and “agency” — stands for that flexibility. She followed Durkheim’s program through to what she took as the bitter end, to its logical conclusion — where it sounds an awful lot like a demystifying cultural constructivism — and she applied it not simply to everyone else’s constructs but to the author’s own.

This is anthropological irony at its most productive.
– Rena

By: Early Modern Notes » Mary Douglas, 1921-2007

Early Modern Notes » Mary Douglas, 1921-2007 — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:34:22 +0000

[...] Guardian obituary Wikipedia page Fan page Biog Interview with Alan Macfarlane Anatomy of Disgust More links at Savage Minds Posted by Sharon on 21 May 2007 at 6:34 pm in [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 18 May 2007 11:56:58 +0000

Danny Miller has a nice post on the Material World blog.

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 18 May 2007 08:09:29 +0000

And here is one from the Guardian by Fardon:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,,2082786,00.html

By: Roberto Labanti

Roberto Labanti — Fri, 18 May 2007 07:47:35 +0000

An obituary appears in today’s Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1805952.ece